


speță

by Azzandra



Series: it's the future, you see [3]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, with some surprise cameos by canon characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 06:35:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19806718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: An incident in Mechanicsburg, circa spring 2019.





	speță

_Six out of seven popes agree,_

_It's the twenty-first century!_

\--ad jingle for Pipkin Pocket Watches (2001)

* * *

Lori Scripcar's teachers all had a problem, and that problem was Lori Scripcar.

The one who had to deal with this issue, then, was Lori Scripcar's mother, who had a full-time job already, and had not factored in the possibility that any of her children would be Sparks when she and Mr. Scripcar decided to have themselves a few. 

That day, at least, Mrs. Scripcar had received a call from Lori's homeroom teacher to prepare her for when Lori arrived home with a medium-sized plastic storage box and a sheepish look on her face. 

"So," Mrs. Scripcar said, meeting her daughter at the door, "what was it that you were supposed to be doing in Biology today?"

"Animal dissection," Lori said, giving the contents of her box a dejected look.

"And what is it that you did in Biology today?" Mrs. Scripcar continued.

"The exact opposite," Lori mumbled.

Mrs. Scripcar tried not to sigh too audibly. The bottom of the box had been filled with fresh wood shavings, perhaps courtesy of the school's workshop. A white rat, its eyes filmy and blind, was snuffling through the shavings. When it raised itself up on its back paws to sniff the air above, it exposed a long, stitched scar down its belly. It also had two tiny neck bolts, apparently made from re-purposed screws. Mrs. Scripcar dearly hoped no desk had been taken apart yet again in the middle of a Spark surge.

"Lori, we talked about performing revivifications on school property," Mrs. Scripcar said.

"Not without a teacher's permission, I know," Lori said, before continuing in a breathless burst: "But Alex was really upset about the dead rat! She was almost crying, and the teacher was going to make her cut it up and she didn't want to."

And sure enough, Mrs. Scripcar knew she was the one Lori had inherited her bleeding heart from, because she couldn't stay upset at the girl.

"I suppose," Mrs. Scripcar sighed, "it's a good thing we kept the weasel enclosure."

Lori's face split into a grin. 

The weasel enclosure had been taking up a quarter of her room ever since their old pet died, three years prior. It was before Lori'd broken through, so no unfortunate revivification incident then, but they'd only taken down the tubes from around the house, and kept the cage. It was large enough for a weasel, so it would undoubtedly be enough for an undead rat.

"Just remember to go to the petshop and pick up anything you'll need," Mrs. Scripcar added, as Lori skipped to her room.

* * *

Lori knew her mother had a point about going to the petshop. She knew that the basic things, like food and enrichment toys, could be acquired at the one just down the street. But for the fancy stuff, such as safety locks and a Construct Sapience Test Kit, she'd have to go into the Old Town. 

The next day was a Friday, so it was still a school day, and since her classes started at one o'clock, she had to make the trip in the morning. It was a pleasant spring day, so tourist traffic would be insufferable, but the quicker she got this over with, the quicker she could get back home and then to school.

She took one of the public tarambulas, staking a seat next to the window. In the outer parts of Mechanicsburg, buses and trams did the job well. But in the old town center, where the more touristy parts were, the tarambulas were the best way to get where you were going quick. Their long, almost delicate-seeming metal stilts could carry an entire carriage of travelers far above the streets and the wheeled vehicles below, rendering them completely impervious to traffic jams.

The tarambula system had been gifted to Mechanicsburg a couple of generations ago, by one of the Sturmvorauses, for the occasion of a Heterodyne's birthday. Eventually Sturmhalten had moved on from the tarambula system, as each sparky Sturmvoraus heir kept tinkering with and improving their public transit system. 

But in Mechanicsburg, the tarambulas were still held in high regard, mostly because they appealed to the Mechanicsburger sense of aesthetic more strongly than the alternatives. Once in a while, a Heterodyne or one of their friends would tinker and upgrade, bringing the tarambulas in line with new technological breakthroughs, but they'd become such a familiar part of the Mechanicsburg skyline, that no one would do away with them permanently at this point. 

Tourists, as a rule, seemed to regard them as some sort of local eccentricity rather than a valid mode of transport.

But they offered one hell of a view for the passengers. Mechanicsburg was built a bit like a bowl. The outer rings of the city were more recent, and so the buildings were not only newer, but taller and shinier as the city extended outward. What Mechanicsburgers called the city center was not a center, so much as the outspill of skyscrapers at the mouth of the valley. 

The Old Town, though, had remained generally intact over a century of shifting architectural trends. It was what had once been the entirety of Mechanicsburg before the Diesel Wars, surrounded by its old walls and still under the full influence and control of Castle Heterodyne. None of the Heterodynes so far had thought to extend the Castle's reach beyond the Old Town walls and into the new parts of Mechanicsburg. Probably for good reasons, from what Lori knew about the Castle.

As the tarambula scuttled along, Lori checked her watch. She fiddled with the touchscreen, idly sending the wheel of icons spinning once or twice, but as it stopped, she checked on her notifications. The Minions Monthly! app showed updates. Back in the day, when it was still in print, Minions Monthly! had been the premiere science tabloid, sharing the hot gossip on the continent's most popular Sparks. 

Nowadays, it and its main competitor, MAD Magazine, were entirely digital, and their output consisted mostly of science memes, listicles, and quizzes. Lori liked their pop culture nostalgia pieces; she'd been a quiz junkie for a while, but had stopped cold turkey when she took the "Which Character from The Heterodyne Boys (1992) TV Series Are You?" quiz and it told her she was Barry. This result offended her deeply in the part of her soul where she was convinced she was Lucrezia, and she never recovered.

She barely got to thumb all the way through a listicle about top five disastrous Spark projects that somehow turned out okay before the tarambula skittered to a halt at Lori's station. She disembarked and cleared away, and the tarambula rose again on its stilt legs and disappeared around a building.

* * *

The Old Town was always milling with tourists, and Lori could spot them by all the trilobite paraphernalia they were all bedecked in. Trilobites had become tacky to wear out in the open over the years, and like most Mechanicsburgers, Lori had hers tucked away out of sight: a sticker on the inside of her pocketwatch lid, a bit crookedly applied, but still glossy after all these years. Her fingers would sometimes brush against it unconsciously when she was looking at her watch. Her mother had little trilobite earrings, and Lori's father had a tacky belt buckle, though actually what he wore day to day was a necklace with a commemorative coin which happened to have a trilobite stamped on one side.

Lori checked her watch now, just to look up the opening times for Professor Odecka's Pet Shop and curiosities, and the momentary lapse in attention was enough for a rude tourist in an Awful Tower graphic tee to elbow her.

Lori gave the tourist the old Mechanicsburg stink-eye, but she was quite done with braving the streets at this hour. She turned down the Old Town's side-alleys, braving the cluster of narrow backstreets instead.

She had an app to help her navigate, anyway, and her eyes were firmly on the screen of her pocketwatch to trace out the route it showed her, when she glimpsed something purple out the corner of her eye, and paused just long enough to look down into an alley. She stopped dead in her tracks.

The purple she'd seen was the complexion of a Jäger, currently propped against a wall, trying to straighten out his legs. Literally, because on of his shins was clearly broken, and his ankle was twisted at a painful angle. There was a gross squelch as the Jäger poked his shinbone back in line and tied a splint around it.

He spotted Lori just as he was tying off the knot, and blinked at her, surprised. He froze for just a moment, before he visibly gathered himself up and grinned at her, with an apparent sincerity that startled Lori given the gravity of his injuries.

"Hoy dere, leetle gurl. Nottink to vorry about, yah? Hyu go along now," the Jäger said, in an accent so thick it reminded Lori of the way her great-grandma spoke.

But Lori was not about to walk away from whatever this was, and she ducked into the alley with him, staring at his broken form with mounting concern.

"What happened to you?" she asked, kneeling next to him. Her hands hovered fretfully for a moment, but she took over tying the splint for him, especially lower along the leg where he couldn't reach. She remembered how to do it, muscle memory since she learned first aid back when she was a kid in the Junior Jäger Scouts Auxiliary. She never quite imagined this was what she'd be using it for.

"Hy tripped," the Jäger answered her question, somewhat dryly.

Lori blinked, squinted at him, and then looked up--and up, and up, past the roof. He had to have fallen from an airship flying at quite the altitude to incur this kind of damage. She felt the Jäger grin at how quickly she caught on, but really, what other explanation could there have been for this?

"Ho, dun vorry sveethot. Hy just need to heal op for a bit," he assured her, adjusting the mess of his broken limbs so that the bones would heal straight. He seemed indifferent to pain.

"But... won't tourists freak out if they come across you?" Lori asked.

The Jäger's face seemed to light up at this.

"Hyu iz a hometown gurl? Vhy didn't hyu say so!" But he looked around judiciously and nodded. "Yah, ve should mebbe drag me over to Mamma's until hy am fighting fit again. Hyu vant hyu should help an old man out?"

"Uh... sure."

With a bit of maneuvering, Lori managed to hoist the Jäger to his feet. He grunted, apparently impressed with her upper body strength. Well, she wasn't quite as delicate as she would have liked, but at least this meant they'd let her operate the big saw in shop class.

"Nize to meet somevun from de old town," the Jäger remarked as Lori carefully helped him totter along.

"Actually, I live out in the city."

"Dot far? Vot hyu doink here den?"

"Doctor Odecka's pet shop is here. I... have a new pet."

"Ho, dot's nize! Stray?"

"No, revivification."

"Vell, good ting dey schtill teach de basics in school, hey?"

"Actually, uh... that was not what we were supposed to be doing at the time. Kinda got in trouble for it."

The Jäger laughed, and jabbed her shoulder with a finger.

"Dun let anyvun tell hyu hyu iz not a hometown gurl."

Lori gave a laugh at that as well. The way this conversation was going, it really did feel like speaking to great-grandma Petra.

Lori's laughter, however, cut off a few second after the Jäger's, when she noticed the shadows. Or rather, when she noticed the one extra shadow that should not have been there.

"Dem. Thought I shook dot vun off," the Jäger said, his mouth pulling down at the corners.

"What is it?" Lori asked, barely above a whisper. 

"Vun of doze dinger ghosts."

Dinger ghost?

"You mean, a Schrödinger's Apparition?"

Lori's blood went cold. It was one of those remnants of the past. During the Diesel Wars, Europa saw the deployment of the most devastating weapons in history, and cataclysmic inventions of such unparalleled destruction, that they changed how the world dealt with Sparks from that point on. They were the reason that, ever since she broke through, Lori had to attend counseling once a week, and got an annotation on her academic record that warned any teachers or instructors of who they were dealing with.

The apparitions were not one such weapon, but the lingering after effects. A being/not-being, a walking tear in space-time that could devastate people in ways that defied imagination.

But those were always _out there_ , in flyover country. How could one appear in a city? How could one appear in Mechanicsburg, when the weapon which caused them had never been deployed here? It made no sense. There was no reason for it to be so far from a former battlefield.

"How did it get here?" Lori asked, her voice lowering to a whisper.

"...Dot iz mine own fault," the Jäger admitted begrudgingly. "Hyu know, ven a dinger ghost seez hyu, dere iz fifty-fifty chance it vill reach und kill hyu."

"...I know that now," Lori said, her voice sounding faint compared to the alarm bells ringing in her head. For once, she wished she'd paid more attention to those boring Diesel Wars documentaries that were always running on the History Channel.

"Ahah... vell... hm. See, if dere iz fifty percent chance ov it losink hyu, den iz best to be alone faced vit one, yez? So, Hy tink op on de ship, vot iz sure-fire vay to loze de ghost before anyvun come und poke dere head in, und get its attention?"

"So you jumped out of the airship."

"Voz not so great plan in retrozpect. But it had fifty percent chance ov vorking, yah?"

"But now there's two of us."

"Yah, not goink to lie, dot iz bad. Two people meanz von hundred percent chance ov it seeink somevun."

"That... is not how statistics work, but I don't know enough about quantum physics to contradict you. How do you usually deal with it?"

"Vell, dere iz de mirror projector ve uze."

"You didn't have one before you sent yourself hurtling towards the ground?"

"...Hy might haff broken it a leetle."

Lori was too keyed up with adrenaline to sigh in exasperation, so instead she tried to think. The Schrödinger's Apparition might be an unthinkable monster capable of breaking the rules of the universe, but so were Sparks, dammit.

"Can you stand on your own?" Lori asked.

"Hy ken run, iffen Hy dun care about my ankles."

Lori didn't know much about Schrödinger's Apparitions, but she knew running was very bad. It was in all the horror movies: the faster you tried to run away, the quicker they reached you.

Right now, it wasn't just that they could afford to stand still and have a chat, it was literally their only option. With their backs firmly to the apparition, Lori eased the Jäger's arm off her shoulder, and he staggered upright, testing his footing. He moved far too gingerly, which meant his bones were not quite knitted together yet. Even knowing what she did about Jäger durability, she wouldn't rely on him in a fight at the moment.

Lori snapped out her pocketwatch and started pulling up the system settings on the device. This wasn't like revivification, which was kid stuff. This was Lori's specialty, and the way she could mod a watch to hell and back had her counselor make worried faces and have hushed conversations with her homeroom teacher. But then, it also had every kid from here to Sturmhalten hit her up on WatchApp for mod work, and it made for good pocket money. 

Lori input a series of commands, faster than the eye could see, then held the dial down for a hard reset and placed it on the ground.

The watch was still for a few moments, before it shook, and its rim unfolded into little feet.

The Jäger blinked as the watch tottered off towards the apparition.

"Vot did hyu do?"

"A mirror projector is just a camera and a screen, both at once. Observation and individuation. I did a project like that for art class once."

"...Hokay?" he blinked in response, which Lori took as a prompt to continue.

"So I set the watch in homefinder mode and messed with its base user information." Lori pointed a thumb over her shoulder. "It's going up to the dinger ghost and asking 'are you my owner', basically. It's observing the ghost and asking it to individuate itself."

"Iz dot teeny thing really going to vork?"

"Size doesn't really have anything to do with it, but, there's one sure way to find out."

They began walking, slowly, carefully, and then they picked up in speed when they noticed the apparition was not following them.

Lori was ready to slump against a wall in relief.

"Goot vork, keedoh! But now hyu lozt hyu vatch," the Jäger said.

"I had all my data backed up," Lori shrugged, with more casualness than she was going to feel once she got home and the fact that she lost her watch was going to sink in.

* * *

With a dinger ghost out on the loose in Mechanicsburg, it seemed to Lori like the moment the cavalry was going to have to get called in. But the Jäger--he introduced himself as Hodrin--insisted the place to go was a nearby beer hall.

Or, at least, Lori assumed it was a beer hall. It was sometimes hard to be sure with buildings in Old Town, and she'd never been into a drinking establishment before, but Hodrin was quite insistent, and apparently on good enough terms with the owner that he knew the back way in. She'd had to help him stagger down the steps into a basement.

It was not creepy, as basements went. There were long tables with benches, a cramped stage at the far end, a wall filled with what Lori thought were trophies from that distance. Hodrin was well enough to walk by himself at that point, and he hobbled along ahead towards the bar counter.

Lori followed, wierded out and fascinated by this place, and when Hodrin gestured for her to sit, she hopped up onto one of the stools along the far end of the bar.

Maybe because it was ten in the morning (probably past ten, but it wasn't like she had any way of knowing that now that she'd lost her watch, and _oh sweet God she'd lost her watch how was she going to get through the day_ ), but the establishment was fairly dead. There was one other Jäger slumped over drunk at one of the tables, and then two people at the other end of the bar, but not even a bartender was in sight.

Hodrin told her to sit tight and he hobbled on towards one of the back rooms. This made Lori nervous, because she was almost definitely not old enough to be in this place, and she didn't know how likely it was that anyone was going to buy her story if she explained how she got there.

But it didn't seem like anyone was going to accost her yet. The two patrons at the other end of the bar counter weren't even paying her any attention. One of them was a woman in a very large and unseasonable fur coat.

This didn't make Lori feel any more comfortable. She wished she at least had her pocketwatch to fiddle with, but as it were, she was stuck twiddling her thumbs and pretending to be very interested in her surroundings.

A radio was mounted up on the bar, one of those old-fashioned cathode ones. The music playing was equally vintage, something lo-fi and grainy, sung by some gravel-voiced balladeer from back in the days when people dealt with food shortages by chainsmoking their appetites away.

" _I heard the voice and I gave my soul_

_To a little old man who knows it all,_

_And when he speaks, my job's to listen well--_

_No good minion ever went to hell._ "

The song proceeded through four more stanzas of the minion doing increasingly morally questionable things for his master until, in the final stretch, the ground opened up and hell was implied to have swallowed him whole. Or maybe the master's earthquake machine malfunctioned. It was ambiguous.

It was the kind of depressing song that must've come out during the Diesel Wars, or in the run-up to it.

Hanging above the bar was a sign saying 'Ve get too soon oldt und too late schmart', and Lori was staring right at it having a mental fit about linguistics when the back door opened and Hodrin bustled out again, followed by another, much larger Jäger.

That--was General Gkika. Lori might not have ever seen her in person or up close before, but like any good Mechanicsburger, she could have picked General Gkika out of any crowd, and the girl all but jumped to her feet, unsure if she should be saluting.

"Did my boy here get hyu in trouble, sveethot?" General Gkika asked, just as her skin swirled from turquoise to a deeper teal.

"Uh--no, ma'am?" Lori said, feeling like maybe she was the one in trouble. She glanced at Hodrin, who smile encouragingly. "I think he was the one in trouble."

Lori had a moment to think maybe she'd been too cheeky, before General Gkika burst into laughter.

"Hokay, dis vun gots spunk," General Gkika said in an aside to Hodrin, "but dun let me catch hyu dragging keeds into hyu schtupid buziness again."

"Hy told hyu--" Hodrin raised his palms in a shrug.

"Yah, yah," Gkika waved him off. Hodrin shrugged and tipped his hat to Lori before making his exit. Lori gave him a tiny wave in response, unsure how she felt about being left alone with a Jägergeneral. But Gkika gestured Lori towards the stool. "Sit down, keedoh," she continued. "Hyu izn't in trouble."

"Um. Okay," Lori said, and hopped back up onto the stool.

Gkika gave a smile with more sharp teeth than Lori expected to see in an entire lifetime, and leaned an elbow over the bar. She looked Lori over with what was probably a very discerning eye, and Lori withstood the scrutiny, albeit stiffly.

"Hometown gorl, huh?" Gkika asked.

"Yes, ma'am," Lori said. "I live out in the city."

"Hokay, vell, best ve gets hyu home den, yah?"

"...I can get home by myself, thanks?" Lori replied, a bit baffled. She was in highschool, she wasn't a tiny child. And anyway, she still had time to make it to the petshop if she hurried, though without her pocketwatch and the maps app on it, she wasn't so confident about getting there without making a wrong turn.

"Hoo boy, hyu got no idea vot hyu almozt got hyuself into today," Gkika huffed. "Hyu young vuns alvays gots to be de death ov uz, don't hyu?"

Lori was ready to say that she thought she'd handled the dinger ghost quite well, thank you very much, but she was stopped by the knowledge that yes, she very probably almost suffered a fate worse than death.

"Maybe, um... maybe it's best that I don't know, ma'am," Lori said instead.

Gkika made a long wheezing sound that might have been a laugh.

"Hyu lookink for a job, keed?" she asked.

"...No, I'm sixteen."

"Apprenticeship?" Gkika offered next.

"...Those still exist?"

"Dey do in de right line of vork," Gkika said with a strangle twinkle in her eye.

Alright, Lori was going to bite. "What line of work is that?"

Gkika's smile grew wider as she flagged down the two patrons at the end of the bar.

"Hoy, Anevka, gots a live vun for hyu!" she shouted.

The woman in the fur coat turned around. She was impossibly beautiful in a way that deliberately advertised it was artificial, in everything from the flawless creamy skin to the long ringlets of bright red hair. When she strode up to Gkika and Lori, she shrugged her fur coat onto her shoulder in such an elegant motion, that she looked like an old movie starlet just stepping off the screen, rather than a real person. She was wearing a pant suit in white, crisp and unstained in a way that had to be because of Sparkwork, because nobody in Mechanicsburg ever went that long without a grease stain.

Lori was maybe a bit more intimidated than she let on. Probably. She may have been letting on a lot, given the amused once-over the woman gave her. Anevka, her name was?

"Hyu iz schtill recruiting, yah?" Gkika asked.

"Not straight out of the kindergarten I'm not," Anevka replied with affected disinterest.

"I'm sixteen," Lori muttered.

"Tell her how hyu dealt vit dot dinger ghozt," Gkika said in a stage whisper.

This time Anevka gave Lori a more speculative.

Lori's eyes darted from Gkika to Anevka, feeling like a bug under a magnifier glass. But then, it seemed like all this attention was part of the test--or maybe the job interview?--so she straightened up and decided to make a good impression.

"Well," Lori said, trying to decide where to start, "I was going to this petshop in the Old Town, because I... I got a new pet."

"Lovely. Stray, or did you build it yourself?" Anevka flipped her hair carelessly over her shoulder.

"Revivification, actually," Lori said.

"Ah, so at least they do still teach the basics in school," Anevka huffed.

And then Lori had to go on a tangent again, explaining everything up to that point.

But strangely enough, the more she spoke, the easier it got, until she was explaining the entire string of events that had led to her being in that beer hall that morning, and her audience listened with increasingly rapt interest.

By the end, Lori came out of that conversation with an apprenticeship, though it would be quite a bit longer until she actually understood what she was apprenticing in.

**Author's Note:**

> This is it, the fic I started working on before I got sidetracked with the other two fics in the series! I'm still not entirely happy with it, but I'm throwing it up here because an imperfect but finished fic is still better than an endlessly lingering WIP that might hypothetically be a perfect fic if it hangs out in writer limbo long enough.


End file.
